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Luckily there are a lot of articles about why psychology is important in UX/UI design. But unfortunately, only a few of them provide practical knowledge. What I mean by practical knowledge is those daily designs that exemplify the impact of psychological rules on design. Collecting more examples and techniques that can immediately be applied into designs is why I started Cognitive UXD and why I’m writing this article. I collected 3 daily examples where you can connect the basics of psychology with online behavior patterns. With these tips under your belt, you can consciously design user experiences that truly fit your users. Enjoy.

Psychology in UX

Information visualization requires mapping data in a visual or occasionally auditory format for the user of the visualization. This can be challenging because while some data has a spatial relationship built in (for example, temperatures in cities around a country) many data sets don’t have a traditional spatial relationship (for example, salaries within an organization). Henry D Hubbard, who was a member of the US Bureau of Standards in the 1920s, said; “There is a magic in graphs. The proﬁle of a curve reveals in a ﬂash a whole situation — the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.”

When we think of empathy we are likely to think “I hear you” or imagine “walking a mile in another’s shoes.” Or we might view empathy as feeling what another person is feeling, or understanding what he or she is thinking. It’s true that if we step into the place of another or imagine what that person is feeling or thinking we might feel empathy, but not necessarily.

In a customer-centricity project, the output is a strategy to show the way forward and the customer experience design is informing how to get there. This kind of project requires a different type of personas — we call them behavioural archetypes. The purpose is to educate the stakeholders in the client company (external to the design team) about their existing customers so they can tailor their business goals towards serving them better. This is needed because traditionally businesses focus primarily on their own product and what’s important for the business, but tend to forget (or not know at all) what’s important for their customers.

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Human Cognition

Besides allowing us to perceive our surroundings, eye movements are also a window into our mind and a rich source of information on who we are, how we feel, and what we do. Here we show that eye movements during an everyday task predict aspects of our personality. We tracked eye movements of 42 participants while they ran an errand on a university campus and subsequently assessed their personality traits using well-established questionnaires. Using a state-of-the-art machine learning method and a rich set of features encoding different eye movement characteristics, we were able to reliably predict four of the Big Five personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness) as well as perceptual curiosity only from eye movements.

According to Nielsen Norman, service design is: The activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience. It’s important to realize services are not tangible goods. An interface is not a service. A product is not a service. Shostack states, “People confuse services with products and with good manners. But a service is not a physical object and cannot be possessed.

Human, AI and UX

Statistics help us summarize and understand the hard data we collect, and instincts do the same for all the messy real-world experiences we observe. And that’s why the best products — the ones that people want to use, love to use — are built with a bit of both— Braden Kowitz
For many tech companies, design and data are intertwined. Companies work amid a constant stream of data detecting the impact of every minute change, and rely on teams of analysts, data scientists or engineers to continuously monitoring hundreds of metrics and multiple iterations.

While design instincts are still valuable, data and analytics can help you hone your product understanding and ensure your decisions satisfy stakeholders.